Tegea (Greek: Τεγέα) was a settlement in ancient Greece, and it is also a former municipality in Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Tripoli, of which it is a municipal unit.[2] Its seat was the village Stadio.

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Ancient Tegea was an important religious center of ancient Greece,[4] containing the Temple of Athena Alea. The temenos was founded by Aleus, Pausanias was informed.[5] Votive bronzes at the site from the Geometric and Archaic periods take the forms of horses and deer; there are sealstones and fibulae. In the Archaic period the nine villages that underlie Tegea banded together in a synoecism to form one city.[6] Tegea was listed in Homer's Catalogue of Ships as one of the cities that contributed ships and men for the Achaean assault on Troy.

Pausanias visited the city in the 2nd century CE. The "tombs" he saw there were shrines to the chthonic founding daemones: "There are also tombs of Tegeates, the son of Lycaon, and of Maira (or Maera), his wife."

They say Maira was a daughter of Atlas, and Homer makes mention of her in the passage where Odysseus tells to Alkinous his journey to Hades, and of those whose ghosts he beheld there."[8]

The site of ancient Tegea is now located within the modern village of Alea (referred to as Piali before 1915). Alea is located about 10 kilometers southeast of Tripoli. The municipality of Tegea has its seat at Stadio.

In ancient times, the people of Tegea said that Cydon, Archedius, and Gortys, the surviving sons of their king Tegeates, migrated voluntarily to Crete, and that the cities Kydonia, Gortyna, and Catreus, were named after them. Yet the Cretans were denying this; instead they tried to portray these three characters as the offspring of the local heroes Minos and Rhadamantus.[9]